The Liminal Feminine
Women's bodies, with their margins and orifices, constitute a liminal space between the concept of the body in its integrity and the outside world, the Self and the non-Self. Kristeva proposes that women's marginalization stems from their bodies being perceived as abjects: the materiality of their bodily functions and reproductive processes—like the act of birth giving, simultaneously marked by the possibility of life and death—challenge the conceptual distinctions necessary to build and understand reality. The menstruating body, the pregnant body, and the old female body are reminders of human fragility and mortality, and thus they are disturbing, a threat to the social order.
—Sara Manente, "Female Bodies and Posthumanism 101: Abjection and the Body as a Liminal Space"
The body can be conceptualised as an idealized bounded space (cf. Longhurst 2000, McDowell, 1993, Rich, 1987, Shildrick, 1997). While the Western body is often conceptualised as 'individuated and discrete' (Ravenscroft, 2008:207), on a cognitive level, as Longhurst (2001:5) reminds us, the body will always be experienced within a framework of conceptions of inside and outside and troubled by 'the liminal places where the exteriority and interiority of bodies merge.' The transgression of women's body boundaries has been articulated in numerous, often gendered, ways from Grosz's (1994:xii) sense of 'uncontrollable drift' through to Shildrick's (1997) 'leaky bodies' and Longhurst's (2001) 'fluid boundaries.' As Knott (2005) points out the boundaries that are imposed upon the body are not simply those of the bounded flesh defined by skin but are part of the spatial ordering of the body in society. Transgression, then, is reliant on a pre-existent spatial division (Cresswell, 1994). This 'spatial ordering' of boundaries can be felt in purity and pollution behaviour (Douglas, 2002 [1966]), the demarcation of outside and inside (Anttonen, 2005) or in the creation of 'complex cultural processes whereby the human body, psychic forms, geographical space and the social formation are all constructed within interrelating and dependant hierarchies' (Stallybrass and White, 1986:2).
—Amy M. Russell, "Boundaries of the Body: Embodiment and Abjection in Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation"